If you've been hacking away in Ruby for a while and are looking to take your skills to the next level, our panel of seven Ruby experts has a few words of advice for you.

Below are some helpful hints, personal growth-inducing exercises, and tools recommended by some of the best Ruby devs out there. And of course, we welcome any tips or advice you have to give in the comments.

If you're looking for advanced-level code snippets, stay tuned for the next installment in this three-part series on Ruby. And if you're just starting out as a new Ruby dev, check out our tips for Ruby novices, which includes introductory-level advice from the same group of experts.

Jacques Crocker is a Rails Jedi based out of Seattle who loves working on early-stage startup ideas and launching new products. He's helped launch almost a dozen Rails apps this year including HeroScale.com (automatically scale your Heroku workers and dynos) and WordSquared.com (a massively multiplayer online word game).

His advice for intermediate Ruby devs is to "build an executable snippet library." He explained:

"Every time I write some code that I think could have potential for reuse in another project in the future, I copy and paste it into a unit test within a private 'snippets' project. This allows me to go back and pull out snippets of functioning example code whenever I confront the same problem again. The most important thing is that this code is executable, and has associated tests.

"Use this as a replacement for IRB [the Interactive Ruby Shell]. Instead of loading up an IRB instance to verify that some code works, I open up my snippets project in TextMate and start writing some unit tests to get the code working. Running these snippets within TextMate is even easier than IRB (cmd+r)."

Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, and lead developer of the Merb project. He is a member of the jQuery Core Team and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open source projects, like Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, like Thor.

He tells intermediate Ruby coders to "spend some time to properly understand the Ruby object model. Specifically, understand what singleton classes are and how they are used.

"It's possible to muddle along for a long time in Ruby without understanding it, but it will add a lot of complexity to your mental model, because you'll be creating many imperfect abstractions in your mind when the reality is much, much simpler."

Obie Fernandez is the founder and CEO of Hashrocket, a Florida-based web consultancy and product shop. He's a well-regarded blogger and speaker, and he's also a series editor and book author for higher-education publishers Addison-Wesley.

For mid-level Rubyists, he advises them to not "go crazy" when it comes to metaprogramming.

"There is definitely a curve in your adoption of Ruby when you start getting comfortable with the core language features and start exploring some of the wilder possibilities. For me it was a little over a year in when I started doing a lot of DSL (Domain-Specific Language) stuff in Ruby.

"When you get into heavy usage of instance_eval, friends, your code starts getting more and more difficult to understand and maintain. Yes, Ruby has incredibly powerful metaprogramming powers, but if you're using them in your day-to-day application programming, I'm going to bet you're doing it wrong."

Desi McAdam is a Ruby developer at Hashrocket. She also co-founded and regularly contributes to the technical blogging group DevChix.

McAdam says that for her personal growth as a Ruby developer, "Playing around in IRB is something that has helped me. One example of this is opening up classes, extending them, including them, etc., to see how the method calls happen in one way versus another. It really helped me understand when to use extends versus when to use includes."

She also said that code katas, études for programmers, have been extremely useful in helping her improve her Ruby skills. "There are a bunch out on the web, and it's a really good way to beef up your Ruby knowledge because the exercises prod you into certain aspects of the language you might not otherwise hit in your everyday Ruby coding."

Raquel Hernández is an experienced hacker/mathematician with a background that includes many programming languages and many work environments, from freelance and contract work to startups and larger companies. However, she's made a particular focus of Ruby and Rails.

She said that reading and researching other developers' code is the best way for an intermediate Rubyist to improve his or her skills. "Don't just install a gem; look at how things work internally.

"I also try to follow other Rubyists on Twitter; the same for code projects on GitHub, conversations on mailing lists, newsletters, etc. — everything that helps me keep up-to-date.

José Valim is the founder of Plataforma Tec, a web development shop and consultancy. He's also an open source developer and a Rails Core team member.

In addition to reading source code from other developers and other projects, Valim recommends that intermediate Ruby devs get involved with open source projects, themselves. "You can learn a lot by doing these activities... Ruby's community is responsible for several open source projects, conferences, tutorials and blogs that improve and bring new ideas into the Ruby ecosystem every day."

As an open source developer, he also encourages more women specifically to get involved in open source Ruby coding.

Specific Questions or Tips?

If you're an intermediate Ruby dev and you have a question, feel free to drop it in the comments! Our panelists are likely to stop by with more feedback.

Likewise, if you're a more experienced Ruby dev and you feel like answering questions or passing on some great advice of your own, please leave a comment and school us all.

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